integrating GPG with deniable steganography

Florian Weimer fw@deneb.enyo.de
Tue Mar 20 14:55:07 2001


Andrew Marlow <apm6674@apmsoftwareltd.alkazar.co.uk> writes:


> Suppose Bob sends Alice a GPG-steg'd message. Wendy intercepts
> it and runs the decode program. She then serves Alice with
> an RIP decryption notice. Alice refuses. Her argument is that
> Wendy has recovered random data because the message she received
> was not concealing another message via the encode/decode programs.
I don't think this will work in practice. Steganography is still in its infancy. If the algorithms are public, the party with the better noise model wins---and that's the government agencies. The only solution which seems to work at the moment is not hiding the communication per se, but the amount of communication. You might be forced to reveal some parts of the message, but nobody can tell if you've revealed all of it. Of course, you might get into trouble because they already know that there was additional information transmitted (for example, because the other end revealed it), so this scheme is most suitable for encryption of storage. I think there's even a Linux file system which implements this approach. Have a look at Markus Kuhn's site.